Wine and The Astounding She-Monster.

[JimHow]

It is, of course, the greatest B movie ever made.

Watching The Astounding She-Monster and Paris, Texas are my only two requirements of friendship with me.
It looks like the whole She Monster movie can be viewed here:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3juwl4

You might just want to watch the trailer first to whet your appetite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdyBTc9 ... SrpT2sgive

Your assignment, BWEers -- if you dare to accept it -- is to watch the entire hour-long movie while consuming a fine northern Medoc, and then writing your review here. For extra credit, you can move on to Paris, Texas...

Good night. And good luck.

[stefan]

Paris, Texas is a great movie; I have watched it many times. The late Kit Carson, who co-wrote Paris, Texas, was a groomsman in my older brother's wedding. I last saw Kit at my nephew's wedding. He had moved back to Dallas partly because he wanted Hunter, the kid star in Paris, Texas, to go to Jesuit College Preparatory School, from which Kit and my brothers graduated. (I attended but was a high school drop out.) At the reception Kit told me about a screenwriting job he was working on that never got picked up. The starting idea was, "what if Hunter Thompson had won that election for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado" and, I think, subsequently became mayor?

Kit and my brother graduated from Jesuit the year before I started there, but in High School I sometimes hung out with his younger brother, D. His parents had a small farm near Dallas and raised some cattle. D's favorite game was to get his friends to try to ride the family bull. D liked to tie the rope with a slip knot. D was as about as weird and artistic as Kit, but his talent was drawing, not writing. I don't know what D did when he grew up, though.

I last saw The Astounding She-Monster in 1957 or 1958. Time to revisit it.

[JimHow]

Wow that’s a great story, Stefan, I guess that makes me only two degrees separated from Nastassja Kinski!
I dated a beauty queen from Paris, Texas, an eternity ago.
It is my favorite movie of all time, still has quite a cult following, it is the favorite of a lot of actors and musicians.
My friend saw Ry Cooder at the Montreal Jazz Festival a couple weeks ago, he says he was one of the highlights.

[stefan]

He being the brother of the late Marie France Pisier, it is not surprising that my co-chairholder is a film buff of the first order. He has a poster featuring Nastassja Kinski from the movie Paris, Texas hanging up in his office. When he is in Paris or Provence I sometimes enter his office just to look at the poster.

[JimHow]

I've always said Nastassja Kinski in Paris,Texas is one of the most beautiful actresses to grace the silver screen.

[DavidG]

Well, you made me look...

The Astounding She-Monster and the 2000 Gruaud Larose both opened a bit thin and weak, leaving me wondering where they would go and whether I’d made a mistake.

At the end of an hour the Gruaud had blossomed into a wonderfully aromatic, medium bodied and beautifully balanced wine with moderate aged complexity and a long finish. I’ll continue to enjoy it throughout the rest of the evening. The She-Monster? Enjoyable as an example of its genre. At the end of the hour, I wasn’t exactly pining for more.

Jim, can I still be your friend?

[JimHow]

Lol.. you know, I slept under the covers for years after watching that movie as a kid, fearful that the astounding she-monster would come into my room at night. Not exactly sure what Freud would have said about that, although it was certainly a harbinger — or at least a metaphor — of things to come in my relationship with the female of the species.

[stefan]

>>
fearful that the astounding she-monster would come into my room at night.
>>

Really? I remember hoping that she would come into my room at night. I must watch the movie again. But not tonight. I worked all day and now want to watch the recording of the third round of the Open.

[DavidG]

>>
fearful that the astounding she-monster would come into my room at night.
>>

Really? I remember hoping that she would come into my room at night.

LOL. Puberty will do that.

I’ll be up early to watch the final round of the Open. Carnoustie appeared to be playing awfully easy today for such a feared course. More wind is expected for the last round so it may be more challenging.

[JimHow]

My brothers and I used to call her the “electric lady.”
I had nightmares for literally years after watching that movie, which appeared probably three or four times on the after school science fiction slot on Channel 13. Despite the terror, I watched it every time. I would close my eyes, though, every time they showed a close up of her face. What a terrible ironic tragedy that her end came though a terrible misunderstanding about her peaceful mission as an inter-galactic emissary. Will man ever survive his ignorance? What will be the ramifications for our species when the obviously far more intelligent inter-galactic community learns of her fate?

[DavidG]

Do you recall when you went from simply being afraid to understanding the questions it raised? Or was it simultaneous?

I had a recurring nightmare as a kid about fighting an electric man/monster that lived on top of the Fischer building in Detroit. He flew around electrocuting people or throwing them off of the top of the building. I’m not sure where the image came from, maybe one of the early Outer Limits episodes. No deep meaning I could ever conjure, just good vs evil.

[DavidG]

My brothers and I used to call her the “electric lady.”
I had nightmares for literally years after watching that movie, which appeared probably three or four times on the after school science fiction slot on Channel 13. Despite the terror, I watched it every time. I would close my eyes, though, every time they showed a close up of her face. What a terrible ironic tragedy that her end came though a terrible misunderstanding about her peaceful mission as an inter-galactic emissary. Will man ever survive his ignorance? What will be the ramifications for our species when the obviously far more intelligent inter-galactic community learns of her fate?

They sent Trump.

[JimHow]

The Astounding She-Monster was produced in 1957, the year before I was born.
It was the year of Sputnik, the Cold War well under way, the post-war nuclear era in full throttle.
It was the classc age of science fiction B movies, of Godzilla, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Plan 9 From Outer Space...
When the world was grappling with mid-century comforts, against the backdrop of nuclear annihilation.
The Astounding She-Monster captures that time particularly well, when the lines between good and evil were often as fuzzy as the blurry image of the interstellr beauty lurking in the darkness of the Hollywood hills.
Who was good, and who was evil.
As a nine year old, still two years away from writing my first novel, A Trip to Mars, these philosophical questions were low on my list of concerns.
All I knew was that she could appear suddenly in the night, and one touch from her radioactive hands would result in agonizing death.
For the nxt two years (at least) I slept under the covers, with my rubber-suction-tipped toy dart gun beneath my pillow, in the event that "the electric lady" appeared.
This was also the time, of course, during which I often lay sleepless at night as the shadow men floated in my room, ghostlike beings from another dimension there for a reason that I was never able to determine. (They were the inspiration for a short storty I once posted here, Wojciech Janulewicz.
It appears that Shirley Kilpatrick is still alive today, residing somewhere in the L.A. area.

[stefan]

I just watched she-monster. The subtitle of the movie for a 13-14 year old guy was "the hot naked gal from outer space". I learned about aqua regia (which killed the she-monster) three years after viewing the movie. It was normal that a scientist is the hero, but having the scientist be a geologist was not. The movie is above the norm for sci-fi movies of the time, but I would not have mentioned the great Paris, Texas in the same thread.

[AlohaArtakaHoundsong]

I'll check her out, but since the broader subject of electric people/electrocution is broached, does anybody recall an episode of the original Avengers series where some dude in a white panel truck was driving around electrocuting people? That scared me.